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Mass Communication 41
Dominican libraries that must once have been very large; the utilitarian
attitude to books; the book rules of the friars, quite di·erent
from the conventions governing the libraries of Benedictine and
Cistercian houses—rules that made attrition inevitable; the use of
quaterni, unbound quires; and, finally, technical textual arguments
that also point to large-scale losses. These arguments each have
considerable force on their own, but they also converge towards the
same conclusion—massive losses of sermon manuscripts. The convergence
strengthens each individual argument, as is normal with
evidence of the historical type.
It should be noted that the argument has implications that go
beyond the history of preaching. Model sermons were not the only
books produced and then lost in enormous numbers. The arguments
developed below relativize the whole notion of the print
revolution (while showing that the pressure it put on binders led
to destruction of manuscripts and a misleading impression today
about the di·erence between the number of manuscripts and of
printed books). However, these implications for other genres are
Here I return to the case argued in Medieval Marriage Sermons, 15–30, in order
to answer the arguments set out in Robert Lerner’s courteous but critical review
in Speculum, 79 (2004), 163–5. First a clarification. I did not mean to say that only
practising preachers would have made ‘nonconformist’ changes and that formal
hands point to the existence of an industry. My point about nonconformist changes
(see below) was that they show that there was a skilled and confident amateur
labour force copying manuscripts—for the use of others as well as themselves—
in addition to the production by commercial scribes. My aim at this point was
not to demonstrate a massive loss rate (my arguments for that are quite di·erent)
but to explain how it had been possible for so many manuscripts to be produced.
So Lerner’s evidence that independent scribal variation can be found in all sorts
of texts (not just sermons) is no objection to my argument, and indeed I made
a similar point myself in Medieval Marriage Sermons, 23 n. 62. My argument
about formal hands, too briefly made, was that confident variation was not confined
to personal notebooks which would never be copied and which only one person
could use: see Medieval Marriage Sermons, 25, ‘not the end of the line’. Since
Lerner’s reading of my book will have reached more readers than the book itself,
I must stress that his version of it contains misunderstandings, for which my overcompression
is probably responsible. I further develop the arguments about mass
communication in ‘Printing, Mass Communication and Religious Reformation: The
Middle Ages and After’, in J. Crick and A. Walsham (eds.), TheUsesofScriptand
Print, 1300–1700 (Cambridge, 2004), 50–70. Note that there I analyse the arguments
of Uwe Neddermeyer’s very important Von der Handschrift zum gedruckten Buch:
Schriftlichkeit und Leseinteresse im Mittelalter und in der fr•uhen Neuzeit. Quantitative
und qualitative Aspekte (2 vols.; Buchwissenschaftliche Beitr•age aus dem Deutschen
Bucharchiv M•unchen, 61; Wiesbaden, 1998). I do not repeat this analysis here but
it is important for the present argument: Neddermeyer has arguments for a lower
loss rate which are ingenious but do not take into account the di·erence between
the ways in which the friars and the older orders used books.